I’d answered him: “Together, but no grave.”
“You’re a romantic, Cain, did you know that?” He sounded surprised.
I said: “Well, of course I am. Not many of us left, are there?”
“And can you justify putting her life in danger for what, after all, is merely a matter, for you, of making money?”
“No.” I couldn’t help being short with him. “No, I can’t justify it. But she’s coming along anyway. She wants to.”
I was quite sure that she did. I wasn’t exactly quarreling with Bonelli, but we were on the edge of a fight because I knew—as he did—that what I was doing was wrong. And Mai herself had said nothing, but as we talked, she just sat there on the edge of Bettina’s bed with a hand on her mistress’s forehead, as if assuring herself that it was safe to leave her for a while. Seeing Bettina’s eyes on both of us, Mai had told her gently: “Don’t worry about me, I’ll be back to take care of you.” Bettina looked at me and snorted with a faintly amused contempt, as though signifying her disgust that her friend might have found a new interest.
I let it ride; I was in too weak a position to fight if Bettina had said: “First me, now her, is that it?”
Now, the scent of the fragile Chinese girl was on the night air, and she was looking at me as though waiting for me to tell her something very important, her dark eyes solemn and reflective. I bent down and kissed her, and put an arm round her narrow waist, and Theophilo laughed quietly and said in a whisper:
“Maybe we all get killed in a little while. Better you make love now, while you got the chance.”
Mai broke away from me and said, her voice very low: “Have you decided how to do this thing?”
I shook my head. “We go in there and see what there is to see. It might be just a wild goose chase with nothing but crumbling ruins at the end of it.” I thought of the geese in the warehouse, of how well we had worked together there, I said: “When I spoke to Ming, he said he had not seen Sally Hyde, that he didn’t know where she was. And I was pretty damn sure that at that moment he was lying. We sat and talked our heads off, and each of us was playing o jeito, the game, for all it was worth. He told me some truths, and he told me some lies, and I came away convinced that he knows precisely where she is. And if he’s got her tucked away somewhere, Siang-chu is where she’ll be.”
“You can’t be sure of that.”
“No. But it’s a likelihood.”
“She might be dead.”
“If she were, Ming would not be able to resist the temptation to tell her father just how she died. That’s where the real fight is, between those two. Everything else hinges on that. Come below with me for a while.”
Not questioning, she nodded. I saw Theo’s grin in the half-light, and I turned back to him and asked: “How long have we got?”
He shrugged. “Maybe twenty minutes we be in close enough, then ten minutes more while I find where to hide this pork-barrel. We take down sails, no?”
“No. Keep her mobile.”
“Then better maybe stand further offshore. I don’t like them rocks there too much.” We could already hear the waves pounding on them.
I took Mai’s arm and said roughly: “Let’s take another look at the map.”
We went below to the tiny cabin; there was just five feet of headroom, so even Mai had to stoop slightly; and we spread the stolen museum map out on the table under the pale light of the kerosene lamp. One arm around her, I stubbed a finger on the delicate tracery and said: “There, through the vents, if they haven’t been closed up in the last hundred years or so, that’s where we go in.”
Sir Robert had done a fine, meticulously precise job. His own pen had scratched the words in Chinese ink: Escape route used by Sumanu Fu during Manchu raid. February third, 1801. There was another comment: Northeast face of cliff cannot be scaled without ropes.
Well, I’d brought ropes along with me, and half a dozen pitons as well. (Have you ever tried to find climbing equipment, in the middle of the night, in a place where there’s scarcely a cliff in sight? But the junks carried all kinds of stuff, and Theo had found it for me.) We had no grappling hooks, but I hoped that the small anchor from the dinghy would serve as well as anything else.
And the good skipper had also armed the junk with a medley of the oddest looking, most ill-assorted weapons I had ever seen. There were modern Mauser rifles, and there was a homemade breech-loader that looked like a culverin and took any kind of shot that could be crammed into its barrel; there were new Luger automatics, and there was a huge and stubby cannon made of bronze and inscribed in Turkish with the legend: Face to face with my enemies; its carved breech-block was inscribed: Constantinople, 1796.
Mai said, her fingers tracing a pattern along my spine: “And when we are inside?”
My hand was on her hip, and I could feel cool flesh under the rough cord of her denim slacks. I said: “Inside, we play it off the cuff.” It was hard to concentrate on the map. I indicated the place where the air vent on the northeast face led into the main store. In the days of the Boxers, the dynamite which had created such havoc in Canton’s streets had been stored there.
I said: “Here, we follow the line of the service corridors to the lower level, keep moving down till we see lights, or hear sounds, or even smell food cooking. If there’s anyone there at all, that’s where they’ll be, on the lower levels. Fix this chart in your mind, indelibly, because once we’re inside we work in absolute darkness.” She nodded, but her eyes were on me, not on the map. I said: “Keep close behind me, all the time. Anything comes to your attention, anything doesn’t seem right, touch me on the shoulder.”
She nodded again, not taking her eyes off me. My hand was at her waist, then moving up the small breasts, and she was pressing herself into me and trembling, and the next minute we were rolling on the hard teak floor together, clasped in each other’s arms, and the tight-muscled legs were wrapping themselves around me.
And all the time I was asking myself: is this what I really want of Mai?
We went back on deck a little later, holding hands like young lovers and not talking very much, and Theo was there in the prow, pointing ahead to the black-and-white line of the surf. The stars were coming out from behind the clouds, and the moon was clearing, and I didn’t like the light at all, but he whispered, seeing me glance up at the sky: “We hide under the headland there. Nobody see us at all.” He turned to scowl at a sound from further down the deck where the dinghy was being lowered, and whispered an angry order. The small latten mast forward was flapping in the wind, and he scowled at that too.
I whispered: “Any junks use these waters?”
He nodded. “When they smuggle arms into China, they land here sometimes.”
“An onshore watch?”
He shrugged. “Nothing we have no worry about. If Ming come here like you say, he got to have junks too, no? They leave him alone. They don’t look too close either what we are doing, no?”
Watch the wall, my darling, while the gentlemen go by...
It made sense. The orders on the mainland were in all likelihood to see, say, and hear nothing of what went on among the rocks of Siang-chu.
We laid out our equipment on the deck and checked it over for the third time: two hundred feet of knotted nylon-rope, two small flashlights. Mai’s little Walther pistol and Bonelli’s Luger, a sharp hunting-knife with a four-inch blade that Theo had insisted I take along with me, two tear-gas grenades, a tiny Japanese walkie-talkie (the other end of it to stay on board), and three sticks of dynamite with short fuses in them. I felt like a pirate, but there was no denying that we had to be ready for all kinds of trouble ahead of us.
We climbed down silently into the dinghy, and Theo leaned over and whispered, grinning: “You need help, Senhor Cain, you yell. We come fast.”
“I’ll do that, Theo.”
“Don’t you wait too long, dead man don’t yell too good.”
